


The Folly of Youth

by baroque_mongoose



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Gen, POV First Person, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 19:51:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2785619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baroque_mongoose/pseuds/baroque_mongoose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Great-Uncle Ardsley is really not impressed with his great-nephew.  Not impressed at all, in fact.  The boy has got himself into yet another scrape through his own stupidity, and really, how on earth can one be a Wooster if one has no brains?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Folly of Youth

I am always receiving letters from family and friends in England, but I do not often get one from my nephew, Edward. This is entirely understandable, as he is a busy man these days; he is what is generally referred to as “something in the City”, and he is also still a very keen amateur entomologist and is therefore in some demand in the relevant circles. Consequently, I was delighted when a letter arrived from him the other day.

“Is that from Edward?” asked Lucilla, as I passed her the marmalade.

“It is indeed,” I replied. “Well, all the rest of my correspondence looks a little tedious this morning, so I shall save it for last.”

I opened the remaining letters, which were, as I had predicted, largely circulars; and then, with those cleared out of the way, I settled down to read Edward's. When he does write, he always writes at some length, and so I poured myself a refreshing cup of Earl Grey before I unfolded the letter.

“Oh dear,” said Lucilla. “Is it bad news, darling?”

I frowned. “Not exactly bad news, as such,” I replied, “but it's all about the boy.”

“That's rather an impersonal way to speak of your great-nephew, Ardsley,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” I admitted, “but I don't find it easy to relate to him. Generally speaking, the Woosters are tall, slightly built, and intelligent. He is... tall and slightly built.”

“Ah,” said Lucilla. “Is he still at the bottom of the class, then?”

“I'm afraid so,” I replied, “but that is merely the beginning. It does not begin to cover the events detailed here by his loving but increasingly exasperated father.”

“What has he done now?” asked Lucilla.

“Well; he was staying with one of his school chums over the holidays,” I explained, “and it appears that this school chum is related in some way to Miss Trelawney Thorpe. Edward is not clear in what way, but since she is about my father's age, I should imagine she will be either his great-aunt or his great-great-aunt. Consequently, there were a number of her inventions about the house, including a device for the automatic plucking and cleaning of game birds, which, naturally, is otherwise an unpleasantly messy operation.”

“Indeed,” said Lucilla. “My father used to shoot grouse occasionally. I really never thought they were worth the trouble; I much prefer goose.”

“I am inclined to agree,” I replied. “I have never been very keen on shooting birds myself, although naturally they made me do it during my spy training, to improve my marksmanship. I ate the results, because it would have been a criminal waste not to do so, but I really prefer to see them flying undisturbed. Be that as it may, however, many people do shoot, and so it was a useful invention.”

“If it worked on game birds, I presume it also worked on other fowl,” said Lucilla. “Miss Thorpe could have made a great deal of money selling it to butchers.”

“That is possible, I suppose,” I replied, “but you know what sparks are like. They do not, on the whole, go in for mass production. Once they have invented a device, they tend to want to go on to invent another.”

“True,” Lucilla agreed. “So, we have your great-nephew, his school chum, and a spark device which eviscerates dead birds. I can picture quite a wide variety of things which could possibly have gone wrong. Which of them, in fact, was it?”

“Ah; we do not yet have all the _dramatis personae_ in this ghastly farce,” I said. “The school chum has a sister by the name of Guinevere...”

“Guinevere?” Lucilla interrupted. “Really, people are giving their children the strangest names these days.”

“The family are great admirers of Mr William Morris,” I explained. “Therefore Guinevere she is, and she had a beau by the name of Robert who was staying at the same time as my great-nephew. This Robert had his gun with him. It appears that he is the sort of enthusiastic young man who cannot see a pheasant, a partridge or any other type of game bird without wishing to take a pot at it.”

“He sounds awfully like my cousin Arthur,” Lucilla observed. “More tea, darling?”

“Thank you; I should love some. Well, the school chum did not approve of Robert, and had for some time been looking for a way to prevent him from marrying Guinevere. My great-nephew took an equal dislike to him when he met him; Edward says he refers to him as a pill, which I believe is the modern way of saying a cad.”

“What did Robert do to make the boys take such a dislike to him?” asked Lucilla.

“Edward does not say in so many words,” I replied, “but, reading between the lines a little, I suspect they found him patronising. He seems to be only a few years older than they are, and somewhat overly conscious of his newly acquired adult status. But, whatever the reason, they both heartily disliked him; and so the school chum hatched a perfectly idiotic plot to put him off by sabotaging the game-cleaning device. I should, perhaps, mention at this point that the boy is no more a spark than I am.”

“Yes, but although you're not a spark, you do sometimes know reasonably well what you're doing with spark devices,” Lucilla pointed out.

“If I was there while they were being built, yes, I have some idea,” I replied. “But since the game-cleaning device is probably at least forty years old...”

“Ah,” said Lucilla.

“Quite,” I said grimly. “And in order to execute the aforementioned idiotic plot, he naturally first had to get possession of the device. This was where my great-nephew came in.”

“Why?” asked Lucilla.

“An excellent question. The answer appears to be related to the layout of the house, where the device was located, and where the two boys were sleeping; it was likely to be much easier to get it to my great-nephew's room without causing a disturbance. Now, of course, if my great-nephew had a single atom of sense, he would have refused to have anything to do with this piece of flagrant stupidity, but instead he allowed himself to be talked into getting up in the small hours of the morning in a strange house to steal an unpredictable gadget built by someone who is probably still the most powerful spark in Britain. No wonder Edward is mortified.”

“So what happened?” asked Lucilla.

I heaved a sigh. “Here, I fear, the story becomes painful to relate. Having successfully purloined the device, he was making his way back to his room with it. It is, as you may imagine, quite a large and heavy object; it has to be, in order to cope with different shapes and sizes of bird. He had, however, failed to reckon with the family dog, who came running at him. Whether it thought he was a burglar, or was simply attracted by whatever faint smell of blood remained about the device, I have no way of telling; but he panicked and dropped the device, which sprang into operation and made a grab for the nearest approximately bird-shaped object.”

Lucilla went pale. “Good heavens,” she said. “Please, tell me it didn't hurt the dog.”

“Fortunately not; it is embarrassing to have to tell you about a farce, but it would be far worse to have to report a tragedy. No. He was taking a short cut through the drawing room, and the device caught one of the cushions. To his credit – and this, I have to say, is the one thing he did right – he did at least try to shut off the device; however, he could not work out how to do so, especially with the dog still barking at him frantically, and so he decided that he would attempt to contain the feathers instead. There was one of those very large urns standing by the fireplace, and he took this urn and turned it upside down over the device. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs, and went and hid behind the curtain. Fortunately for him, the drawing room had French windows, and therefore, naturally, curtains all the way down to the floor.”

“I suppose it could have been worse,” Lucilla mused. “He might have tried to hide in the urn.”

“Indeed. Well, the first person on the scene was young Robert, with his gun; he was sure he had heard a burglar, and being a very gung-ho young man as I have described, naturally he rushed straight into the fray. Now, picture, if you will, the state of affairs as it presented itself to this Robert. There was the dog, barking madly at an upside-down urn in the middle of the hearthrug, which was rocking gently back and forth and surrounded by loose feathers. Naturally, the only explanation which occurred to Robert was that the burglar had been surprised by the dog and attempted to hide in the urn. I have no idea how he interpreted the feathers, but then, of course, I am not Robert.”

“So I suppose he lifted the urn, and was very startled indeed when he found only the device?” asked Lucilla.

“Not a bit of it. He shot the urn.”

“Ah. And was it a china urn or a metal urn?”

“It was a china urn. And no sooner had he shot it than Guinevere's father, the Viscount, came running in with his own gun. Some shard of china must have got into the workings of the device, because it stopped at once, and so all the Viscount could see was the wreckage of what used to be a priceless urn. Of course, if he had been in a fit state to think a little, it would have been quite obvious to him that the pile was far too large to consist of nothing but shards, and there must be some other fairly substantial object underneath them; but then, he had just been woken up in the middle of the night, only to discover that his prospective future son-in-law had apparently wantonly destroyed his favourite urn.”

“I suppose he did plead that he thought there was a burglar in it?” said Lucilla.

“Naturally he did; but it was clear that there was no burglar now, and, as the Viscount informed Robert at considerable and somewhat profane length, burglars do not simply vanish into the ether. He positively refused to believe that the urn had been moving when Robert found it, accused him of being drunk or insane, and ordered him to leave on the first train the following morning.”

“Well, then, the boys got what they wanted after all,” Lucilla observed.

“Indeed they did; but far more by luck than anything else, and I think it was hardly fair on poor Robert to be falsely accused in such a way,” I said. “Even if he was an unsuitable husband for Guinevere, that should have come out in the normal course of events.”

“So... didn't the Viscount notice all the feathers?” asked Lucilla, curiously.

“He did, but he appeared to attribute them to some delinquency on the part of the dog,” I replied. “Certainly he threw the dog out of the drawing room. By this time, needless to say, he was in a very foul temper.”

“And did he find your great-nephew?”

“No, he did not, or he would have ended up on the same train as poor Robert. Once both Robert and the dog were dealt with, he stormed off back to bed. At this point, my great-nephew emerged cautiously from behind the curtain and extracted the device from the pile of shards, since he was aware that questions would be asked if it were to be found there. However, seeing the mess it was in, he panicked. Rather than taking it back to the kitchens where it belonged, he took it out into the grounds by way of the French windows, and there he buried it in a shallow grave beneath a small grove of trees.” I snorted. “And, of course, once it was found to be missing, Robert was immediately blamed for the theft. If one of our sons did any such thing, I should insist that they wrote a full confession and apology. I think Edward is a great deal too soft with him.”

“Well, darling, it's not at all like you to be harsh in any way,” said Lucilla, “but I do think you are sometimes a little hard on your great-nephew.”

“But he behaved like a complete idiot,” I protested, “and one with no moral fibre, at that. It's one thing to act stupidly when in a panic; we've all done that now and again. But to let himself be talked into helping with a plan that was so obviously stupid, and then to stand by and let all the flak fall on the head of this Robert, who was admittedly not as sensible himself as he could have been, but who was certainly not the author of the confusion... well, really!” I paused. “And this isn't the first time. He has a most unseemly habit of getting himself into this kind of scrape.”

“Wasn't Edward talking about wanting to bring him over here at some point?” Lucilla asked.

“Yes, he did mention that, and I can imagine exactly how it would go,” I said. “Gil would want to meet him. Can you picture him let loose in Gil's laboratory, with his freewheeling tendency to attract disaster and Gil's temper? No, I'm not having that. It's a very good thing that Edward is doing so well for himself these days and will be able to give him a substantial allowance, because I honestly think he's going to need to hire a manservant just to do his thinking for him.”

“Oh, darling,” said Lucilla reproachfully. “I really think that is much too hard on poor Bertram.”

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who still doesn't get the reference, the asinine great-nephew is Bertie Wooster of the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P G Wodehouse (which are excellent reading, although I must admit I do personally prefer Psmith, who has both the class and the brains).
> 
> *grin*


End file.
